Raging Titan

 

Raging Titan

 

We arrived at Piazza Garibaldi at nine forty-five in the morning. Tourists were buzzing around holding mobile phones, maps, bottles of water and an assortment of sunhats. They were chattering in strict German, musical Spanish, and discreet Mandarin, and tongues I could not name, looking for the right meeting point in a sea of buses and asking the unwilling rival tour guides for directions in a panic of tourists, traffic chaos and rising summer heat.

“Excuse me,” I asked a smartly dressed man with straight parted hair, “is this the Napoli Giornata to Vesuvius?” His smile deflated, “No,” he said.

“Do you happen to know where their meeting point is?” I tried again.

His nostrils flickered, “I don’t know,” he interjected in a melodic, deep accent.

“Ok, thanks anyway…” I said, disappointed.

“Any luck?” teased my partner, the corners of his mouth turned up slightly.

I sighed, “I can’t get how you can be this calm about this. We are already late. We paid two hundred pounds for the trip, and that it’s non-refundable,” I stressed the last two words, “not to mention we won’t have time to book a new tour to Vesuvius if we miss this one.”

“Don’t freak out, they’re not going to leave without us. Let’s keep looking.”

“Ugh, your calmness is very stressful, you know that?” I said, but he only laughed and urged me to keep looking.

It wasn’t easy navigating through excited passengers and scores of vehicles.

“I just don’t get why they can’t have a sign of the agency on the side of the windshield so people know which one to board?”

By this time, some of the tour buses were packed and began to depart, decluttering the Piazza, filling the air with the smell of exhaust and me with the dread of being stranded behind.

A man and a woman in their twenties, who appeared to be a couple, approached us. They moved modestly, through passersby giving way and nodding respectfully, bright-eyed and fair-skinned, with thin blond hair that quivered in the wind.

“Excuse me,” the young man began, “ we are looking for the Napoli Giornata to Vesuvius, do you know where it is?”

“We’re also looking for it,” I explained. “We have no idea, and those tour guides are not very helpful, are they?”

They smiled, agreed politely, and joined us in our quest. Seeing that we were not the only ones having difficulty finding the meeting point was a revelation. I took a deep breath and composed myself. Islets of people were now gathered around the remaining buses, which eased our path among them and finally brought us to the Napoli Giornata to Vesuvius meeting point. The sign at the bottom left of the windscreen was a welcome sight to my eyes.

“Hello, sorry we are late,” I explained, “it wasn’t easy finding the meeting point.”

“Not to worry,” said a lean, heavily tanned woman in her thirties, with waist-long jet-black hair. “Names?”

We gave our names and saw her draw large, angular tick signs on a piece of paper with a blue BIC pen. She signalled us in by waving her fingers, giving us the chance to admire her long manicured fingernails. The couple preferred seats near the back of the bus, and we got the ones by the front door. The other seats were already taken, and the passengers were chatting quietly and excitedly, checking the itinerary, and adjusting their seats. I noticed the air conditioning was working, but it made a low, grunting, throaty noise like a dying asthmatic giant. I hoped it wouldn’t give up on us.

“Ok, ok, your attention please,” she pronounced please as “pleasah”. I stole a glance at my partner, and we exchanged a quick grin.

“Now that we are all here, we can finally begin the ascent to Mount Vesuvius. My name is Alessia, and this is our amazing driver, Bito. Say hello, Bito,” he gave us a wave. “Put your hands together for Bito people,” she waited until we did. “Bito is the best driver in Napoli,” she assured us. She was pleasant and bubbly with a balanced combination of charm and exasperation in her tone. “Anything you need, you come to me. If you need to stop for a toilet, if you feel dizzy, anything-anything, you come to me and I take care of it, OK? Let’s go then.”

Escaping the pandemonium of Naples traffic was challenging, but soon enough, we began ascending the winding, narrow road up to the infamous volcano. Alessia drew our attention to the bay of Naples while strategically dumping interesting facts and anecdotes here and there to keep her audience captivated. She seemed particularly excited about the lava flows and the flora of the mountain that draped its slopes in yellow and pinkish bouquets. More than halfway up the mountain, a sweaty cyclist seemed to climb slowly and laboriously up the road. Alessia was not one to keep her opinion to herself.

“You see him?” she asked, pointing. “He is crazy.”

About twenty minutes later, we were at the entrance of the national park. Before allowing us to get off the bus, Alessia gave us some last-minute pointers and made abundantly clear, half-jokingly, half-dead-serious, that she would not hesitate to abandon us in the wilderness if we didn’t meet her right on that very spot by noon. “It is very difficult to walk down to Napoli,” she reminded us in her thick accent. We got off the bus, and at once, the heat attacked our cheeks, exposed legs, and gradually every inch of our bodies, like a wave drenching us in our own sweat. The entrance was divided into queues where two young men checked the tickets. One of them showed some rudimentary effort in validating the tickets, while the other was too preoccupied with his mobile phone to bother and just gestured us in indifferently. A gravel path snaked all the way up to the caldera, littered with volcanic residue of jagged, spongy-looking, pink, porous rocks speckled, here and there, with black, shiny mineral dots. They felt dry and chalky to the touch, and weighed too little for their size, as if they were filled with air.

“Oh, my,” exclaimed a mother from Ohio, looking up at all the climbing we were about to undertake, and I had to admit I agreed with her. Alessia smiled, “What? You paid for this…,” she added, grinning, and left it at that.

One by one, we began to ascend. Wooden poles and thick ropes were installed along the path, limiting the more adventurous and assisting those who needed a bit more help completing the feat. Partners and families huddled together for support, sometimes with a word of encouragement, others with a kick in the shin from one little sibling to the other for a race to the top. The gravel crunched under our feet, and the rising dust stuck on my black sneakers like an annoying advertisement jingle you can’t stop singing. The Ohio mum needed a break. She took a blue handkerchief out of her backpack and started dabbing her forehead, but she wasn’t the only one.

All around, people were breathing heavily, fanning themselves with maps, ticket receipts and straw hats. Water bottles and thermoses made their appearance in an attempt to fight off the heat and exhaustion of the climb. Large wet circles formed under armpits, around neck lines, bellies, and lower backs on our conquest of Vesuvius. Soon we reached the first “official” stop along the way: a small shop with a variety of souvenirs. The cold drinks section was instantly invaded and severely compromised by our attack. Others lingered over an assortment of fridge magnets with the VESUVIUS logo, flimsy keychains, and even locally sourced wine. I took my time scrutinising a collection of volcanic minerals that drew my attention. Chunks of bright yellow sulphur, red quartz, glossy black obsidian, and striking indigo-blue covellite were displayed in a well-crafted cardboard box for fifteen euros.

Next to us, a new queue began to form organically, where people were trying to capture Naples spreading along the coast of the gulf, most likely so they could share it on their social media, rub it in other people’s faces and get back something in return for shedding such copious amounts of sweat.

“Should we get going?” my partner asked, bringing me out of my reverie.

“Huh? Yes, yes, let’s do this.”

We had almost reached the top. The trail remained rough and called for carefully calculated stepping, but on the other hand, it was no longer so steep to strain our breath. The rim of the caldera took a more defined form. With some deliberate observation, you could detect the most ghostly traces of steam lazily evaporating and vanishing in the gentle mountain breeze.

Here it stood, a chasm expanding like a hungry gaping mouth, still, deceptively serene, and beautiful, but underneath this façade hid a raging titan with the power to wipe an entire town off the map. I looked around at the faces of my exhausted companions, and I saw their eyes gleaming as they stared down at the volcano floor, relieved and with a hint of pride in their smiling faces for having completed the quest.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” my partner asked.

“Hmm, very beautiful,” I agreed.

“It makes you wonder, though, would we even visit if it hadn’t killed thousands of people?”

“Probably not, we’d never even hear of it.”

“Yeah. Let’s take a selfie.”